It's your birthday! But, oh no! Conundrum strikes again: you don't eat processed sugar any more, so what are you going to do about birthday cake? Why not bake a
sugar-free birthday cake?
Step one—wash your hands.
Step two—preheat your oven to 350 degrees (Fahrenheit, because we don't want to explode any Canadian/British/The Rest of the World ovens).
Step three—wash your hands again because maybe the buttons on the oven had germs on them.
Step four—you are now sufficiently prepared to handle the ingredients:
Take one green-ish plantain and chop it into bits. Mix it together with...
-a 1/2 cup of applesauce
-a 1/4th cup of liquid coconut oil (I liquefied mine in the microwave, but you can liquefy yours in a Bain-marie suspended over a volcano, if you like)
-and 2 tablespoons of coconut butter
Mix thoroughly until everything is mushy and smooth...ish. Plantains (at least, green-ish ones) are hard, so you may want to blend them in a food processor first.
Once your mixture is mushy, add...
-a 1/2 teaspoon of baking powder
-a 1/2 teaspoon of baking soda
-a 1/2 teaspoon of salt
-4 tablespoons of protein powder
-and 3/4ths cup of raw cocoa powder
Once again, mix until mushy and smooth-ish.
Pour your mixture into a nine-inch circle pan and let it cook for twenty-five minutes.
Repeat instructions for a second cake.
When your cakes are done, they should look something like this:
 |
| My cakes broke it half for some reason... Beware the baking demons! |
While you wait for your cakes to bake, you can make the sugar-free (excepting natural sugars) frosting:
Mix together...
-1 1/2 packages of cream cheese
-1 teaspoon of vanilla extract
-some maple syrup and/or honey. The recipe calls for 1 teaspoon of maple syrup and/or honey, but after one teaspoon of each, the frosting tasted solely of cream cheese, so I added a few more teaspoons of each until it tasted the way I wanted it to.
After your cream cheese, vanilla extract, and maple syrup and/or honey are mixed together, mix in 3 tablespoons of heavy whipping cream.
This recipe only makes one batch of frosting, so you'll want to make a second to cover both of your cakes!
If your cake has split in half like mine did, you may want to glue it back together with frosting. This step is completely optional and doesn't really work.
Frost the top of one of your cakes, stick your second layer on top of that, and then cover the entire cake with your second batch of frosting.
Enjoy your creation! Feed it to your friends and family and hear their amazing feedback:
"Wow, chocolately."
"It goes great with a glass of milk!"
"It tastes good
with the frosting, but the cake by itself..."
"Interesting... [long pause] But good!"
"No, no need to cut my mom a piece. She can finish mine."
"You need to find a way to make it less like a brick and more like a pastry."
Thaaanks Friends and Family.
But, I do agree. There is room for improvement. One of the cakes was quite bitter, though the other cake and the frosting balanced out the bitterness.
I enjoyed the cake more than everyone else who tried it. I think that was because my taste buds aren't used to the overwhelming sweetness of processed sugar, so anything that I eat with natural sweetness (coconut products, maple syrup, honey, fruit...) tastes better than it would to those whose taste buds are used to processed sugar.
You may not enjoy this cake if you are used to processed sugar, but, if you would like experiment with sugar-free/grain-free/egg-free baking, here is a link to the blog where I found the cake recipe:
http://purelytwins.com/2014/09/02/11-ingredient-oreo-cake-grain-egg-and-sugar-free/
What's the most interesting food you've ever tried to make?
